Can Internet Lobbying Be As Effective As Money Spent In Washington?

The Internet was very angry yesterday as the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to discuss the Stop Online Privacy Act, a bill aimed at shutting down websites that host pirated material and counterfeit goods. Mathew Ingram at Gigaom has called it Congress's "declaration of war" against the Internet, saying it would "give governments and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet on the flimsiest of grounds, and would force internet service providers to play the role of copyright police."

Many have described the fight over the bill as Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley, given that entertainment giants like Viacom, Disney, and Time Warner support it (as it would allow them to go all Terminator on pirate movie sites -- "Hasta la vista, streaming films still in the theater!") while technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have come out against it, due to the onerous responsibility it puts upon them to police the Internet for links to these sites. But that oversimplifies the divide. Other industries besides entertainment stand to gain from the bill; among those testifying at the hearing was a VP from Pfizer eager to be able to shut down sites slinging "counterfeit medicines." And lined up on the anti-side are lots of smaller businesses, worried about being held liable for any copyright-infringing material, as well as civil liberties groups and law professors, who are concerned about the lack of due process in shutting down websites with no judicial involvement. Some are likening the bill's tools to excise illegal commerce from the Web to giving a doctor a chainsaw to operate rather than a scalpel.

The homepage for Mozilla, operator of Firefox, expresses its opposition to the bill

Politico has a fascinating chart showing the lobbying money spent by the companies on either side of the bill. Though technology companies are steadily ramping up their spending in D.C., the joint $15 million spent by the likes of Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, & other tech giants opposed to the bill pales in comparison to the $94 million spent so far this year by entertainment companies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Eric Schmidt of Google recently expressed frustration with the way Washington's wheels turn, saying that tech companies are more focused on innovation than regulation. While tech companies are relatively new to D.C. and don't have the lobbying muscle their opponents have, they do have a different way of showing their power: harnessing the power of the Internet.

As an Internet creature, it was fascinating to see the resistance to the bill play out online yesterday. The Internet was as Occupied as Zuccotti Park used to be, but with anti-SOPA rhetoric. A petition against the bill on the White House site, We The People, attracted nearly 40,000 signatures. My Twitter stream was filled with the #SOPA hashtag (thanks in great part to my following legal blogger Mike Masnick, who has been diligently covering SOPA at Techdirt). To protest "America's Firewall," a series of sites slapped "censorship" tags over their logos, including EFF, Boing Boing, Reddit, Mozilla and even Congressional Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, who voiced her opposition to the bill during the hearing. (Google, AOL and Facebook meanwhile went the more traditional route of taking out a full page ad in the New York Times.)

Tumblr, though, may have done the most effective Internet lobbying. It censored user's main dashboards, and directed them to this site to find out why. There users could enter their phone numbers to get a recorded call from Tumblr founder David Karp, who explained what the bill was and offer talking points about it; Tumbler then connected users to their Congressional office, so that they could voice their opposition via phone. Tumblr has millions of users, and this generated a lot of calls. Yesterday, Tumblr said it was averaging 3.6 calls per second. (It worked on fellow Forbes writer, Jason Oberholtzer, who said he hadn't heard of the bill before signing onto Tumblr yesterday.)

So, now the question is: is Internet lobbying as effective as the traditional variety?